foot-travel, clean. Companioning with nature had
browned his skin, and dried his straight fine hair. Any reader of
faces would have seen the lines of unselfish purpose about his lips,
and, when they parted nervously for speech, the earnest glow of that
purpose in a countenance that neither smiled nor frowned, and, though
it was shaded, cast no shadow.

The police very soon knew him. They smiled at one another and tapped
the forehead with one finger, as he turned away with his question
answered by a shake of the head. It became their habit. They would
jerk a thumb over a shoulder after him facetiously.

"Goes to see every unknown white man found dead or drowned. And yet,
you know, he's happy. He's a heap sight"--sometimes they used other
adjectives--"a heap sight happier than us, with his trampin' around
all day and his French and English books at night, as old Tony says.
He bunks with old Tony, you know, what keeps that little grocery in
Solidelle Street. Tony says his candles comes to more than his bread
and meat, or, rather, his rice and crawfish. He's the funniest crazy
_I_ ever see. All the crazies I ever see is got some grind for
pleasing number one; but this chap is everlastin'ly a-lookin' out for
everybody _but_ number one. Oh, yes, the candles and books,--I reckon
they are for number one,--that's so; but anyhow, that's what I hear
Madame Tony allow."

The short, wet winter passed. The search stretched on into the spring.
It did not, by far, take up the seeker's whole daily life. Only it was
a thread that ran all through it, a dye that colored it. Many other
factors--observations, occupations, experiences--were helping to make
up that life, and to make it, with all its pathetic slenderness, far
more than it was likely ever to have been made at Carancro. Through
hundreds of miles of tramping the lad had seen, in a singularly
complete yet inhostile disentanglement from it, the world of men;
glimpses of the rich man's world with its strivings, steadier views of
the poor man's world with its struggles. The times were strong and
rude. Every step of his way had been through a land whose whole civil
order had been condemned, shattered, and cast into the mill of
revolution for a total remoulding. Every day came like the discharge
of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his
walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the
questions of the hour like a naked boy into the s